on prominent artists. He also helped to establish the university's Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts and Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden. Midway in his tenure, in 1964, he was a resident artist and scholar at the American Academy in Rome. The gallery was named the Wight Art Gallery in 1974 in his honor, and in 1991 it held a commemorative exhibition of his work entitled "Sudden Nature: The Art of Frederick S. Wight", featuring more than 50 of his paintings. Art Wight painted throughout his life and frequently showed his work, but his career as an artist took off with surprising force after his retirement from the university in 1973. Moving from relatively quiet still lifes to highly expressive landscapes, he painted celestial fireworks, planets in motion, dramatic sunsets and sunrises, ominous winds and clouds, powerful mountain ranges and seismic shocks. "While for many artists the twilight of a career often represents a refinement of familiar gestures, it was for Wight nothing less than a new dawn, the beginning of his true artistic originality," art historian Edith A. Tonelli wrote in the catalog of UCLA's 1991 exhibition of Wight's work. "He became in these years that rarity at any age, a great painter." "The ultimate theme Wight explored," she wrote, "was the interaction between the ocean shore, the water, and the sky beyond. The continuously shifting illumination of the coast under a variety of climatic conditions and the essential simplicity of the primordial entities of shore, water, and sky encouraged him to an ever greater pictorial freedom." In a catalog essay for a 2008 exhibition at Louis Stern Fine Arts in West Hollywood, Michael Duncan described Wight as a late bloomer who perpetuated "a tradition of hallucinatory American landscape painting by artists such as Agnes Pelton, Marsden Hartley, Raymond Jonson and Georgia O'Keeffe." "His luminous landscape paintings made from 1974 until his death in 1986 are his true legacy," Duncan wrote, "a body of work that significantly contributes to American and Californian art. Still fresh, powerful, and wildly underrated, Wight's landscapes are one of the premier achievements of west-coast art of the 1980s." Wight died July 26, 1986. Selected Art Publications "Milestones of American Painting in Our Century," exhibition catalog, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. New York: Chanticleer Press, 1949. "The Work of Lyonel Feininger," exhibition catalog, Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1951. "Milton Avery,"